the murdered man. Theft committed by man or woman is punished by cutting off the hands of the thief. Fornication in both sexes is punished by a hundred stripes. Full measure and just weight are strictly enjoined, while taking interest for the use of money is prohibited, as are also wine and alcoholic drinks, and games of chance.

To the credit of Mohammed it must be said that he enjoined kind treatment of women and orphans. But one of the worst features of his system, and which necessarily degrades woman, is the permission of polygamy, each Moslem being allowed to have four wives at once, and to divorce them with great facility. But although the Koran degrades woman it does not exclude her from heaven. "But he who doeth good works— be it male or female-and believes, they shall enter into paradise." Slavery is authorized in the Koran, but the slave is allowed to redeem himself.

That Mohammed accomplished some good must be acknowledged; but an impartial judge must decide that the system of the Koran has been an incubus upon civilization and upon intellectual and moral progress. We coincide with the judgment of Sir William Muir:

First, polygamy, divorce, and slavery are maintained and perpetuated, striking at the roots of public morals, poisoning domestic life, and disorganizing society. Second, freedom of thought and private judgment in religion are crushed and annihilated. The sword still is and must remain the inevitable penalty for the renunciation of Islam. Toleration is unknown. Third, a barrier has been interposed against the reception of Christianity. They labor under a miserable delusion who suppose that Mohammedanism paves the way for a purer faith. No system could have been devised with more consummate skill for shutting out the nations over which it has sway from the light of truth.t

* Chap. iv, 3.

Muir's Life of Mohammed, p. 535.

Henry M. Harman

CHARACTER: A SYMPOSIUM.

CHARACTER AND HEREDITY.

THE researches of the last thirty years have projected with peculiar force the word "heredity" into our speech and its deep meaning into our life. Like words which stand for truth, it is becoming weightier as knowledge broadens. First deemed important in respect of the differentiation of species and of the tendency to return to a supposed or proved older type, it has forced itself into the vocabulary of those who write of man in his physical, social, intellectual, and religious aspects.

Christian thinkers have been slow in adopting it as a part of their intellectual furniture, because they feel bound to maintain, first of all, the freedom of the will in man. There is no Christianity without this, only fatalism varnished with Christian ethics. Some authorities have carried the doctrine of heredity so far that man, in their hands, has seemed to be little more than the conscious automaton of Huxley-his whole career being found "seminally," as the old theologians used to say, in his ancestry. Those who know what scientific candor is admit. that it is far more difficult to trace hereditary influences in man than in other animals. Humanity has never yet been bred even toward a physical ideal. Yet the studies of Galton and others show that, taking long periods of family life together, ability, not to say genius, is hereditary. And in respect of tendency toward high moral quality, the experienced can point out families in which it has been manifest for several generations.

If character be the sum of qualities which distinguish one person from another, Christians must find place therein for personal will and choice. They hold that man makes himself even while other forces seem to build him. Drifts, tendencies, aptitudes, pronenesses, proclivities, bents, biases, inclinations, propensities, trends, are heritable. But the personality chooses whether to drift or to row, whether to incline until it falls or to stand like the tower of Pisa, inclined but stable. This is by no means the new doctrine of fate as preached by the ultrascientific and adopted by the modern Buddhistic cult. This

last has never had better expression, even by Emerson, than in the following poem by Frederick Petersen:

"I met upon the woodland ways,

At noon, a lady fair.

Adown her slender shoulders strays

Her raven hair;

And none who looks into her eyes
Can fail to feel and know

That in the conscious clay there lies
Some soul aglow.

But I, who meet her oft about

The woods in morning song,

I see behind her, far stretched out

A ghostly throng:

A priest, a prince, a lord, a maid,
Faces of grief and sin,

A high-born lady and a jade,
A harlequin ;

Two lines of ghosts in masquerade,

Who push her where they will,

As if it were the wind that swayed

A daffodil.

She sings, she weeps, she smiles, she sighs,
Looks cruel, sweet, or base;

The features of her fathers rise

And haunt her face

As if it were the wind that swayed

Some stately daffodil.

Upon her face they masquerade
And work their will." *

In this poem there is no place left for the individual will. It says poetically what Lys says physiologically, that we have no ideas at all except those which reach us through the senses, and which are compounded by machinery whose force is modified by inherited energy or weakness, and whose direction is determined by drifts in the brain itself.

What reasons have we for rejecting such teaching? Far more attractive than the old fatalism, because its foundation comes within the range of the senses, it cannot be driven away by mere denial, nor does it easily surrender to a scripture text. It is certain that in the microscopic spherule which we call an egg the development and destiny of an individual is largely, if not chiefly, inclosed. Our finest processes fail to *Lippincott's, June, 1887.

accurately distinguish between that which may develop into a dog and that which has the potentiality of humanity. Yet the dog and the man are there, and neither will develop into the other. Though the mother-ground in which the development takes place and the generant and fertilizing energy be the same, within the spherule lie most of the differences between individuals of the same genesis. So much in these matters is seen to be of law that these differences cannot well be of accident. Long-gone forces step in to stamp feature, face, and disposition with resurrected quality. Sometimes it would seem as if the ghostly energies had united in some subtle incantation producing the typical man or woman of the family, whole generations compacted into one, and that one an animated composite photograph of past intellectual and physical life-a spirit exuberant with the endowments of many.

We may not receive, then, this modern doctrine of heredity in its relation to character, first, because so far as moral quality is concerned we are not able to separate the inherent from the extrinsic, the instinctive from the acquired. To determine what, if any thing, in respect of moral quality is hereditary, a child must be brought up by itself, separated from example, isolated as to teaching, studied as a tablet on which hereditary forces alone have written. This has surely never been done, and cannot be done. So much of moral development and manifestation depends on communication by language, sign, or touch-so much of morality is the outgrowth of our relation to others that if it were possible to preserve alive an infant. up to maturity separated from all example the very qualities sought to be observed would chiefly lie dormant and invisible. We should have a Caspar Hauser, and not a man.

The most which can be said, then, for heredity is that it creates a drift or tendency of the nature. This is a thoroughly biblical doctrine. As the Duke of Argyll has pointed out, the orthodox doctrine of depravity has its scientific basis. The evil trend is in humanity, and each generation receiving it is yet, despite all experience, philosophy, example, and religion, very imperfectly saved from wrong direction. All can recall how, in their immediate neighborhood, families can be found in which for generations certain forms of sin have abounded. The common speech with regard to such is, "It is in the blood."

But is it sufficiently considered what the effect of example is in such cases, or of the individual's knowledge that such sins have been common in the family? The family remaining together, the force of example inay count for more than the transmitted taint. The case can be better studied when an individual of bad parentage is removed from his family and introduced to totally different surroundings. Training in good families and in benevolent institutions shows that tendencies can be restrained by instruction and bad blood become good blood. The Church has housed millions who "by restraining and renewing grace" have led a new and holy life. Such have found in the religious strength a stronger than hereditary power. The worst early conditions and the most mature moral failures have yielded to the religious impulse.

Secondly, we may not receive this modern doctrine of heredity in its relation to character, because of that consciousness of possible otherwiseness which accompanies all of us through life. By this I mean, that at no moment of sin have we felt compelled to do as we have done. We may have acted under impulse or after deliberation; but whenever we have thought of the matter we have known that we might have done otherwise than we did. The thought of instinct and of hereditary tendency has come in afterward as a salve to our conscience; as palliation in the court of wounded self-respect. We know that we could have chosen to do otherwise than we did because in similar circumstances we have chosen to do differently notwithstanding the pressure and stress of hereditary forces.

Fatalism in philosophy and in religion is always yielding to this consciousness of freedom. The doctrine that we are machines appears in new forms only to pass into desuetude because the instincts of thinking humanity are against it. Men would certainly be glad to be rid of all sense of responsibility and become epicureans if they could be certain that they were in the path of truth. Fatalism' imitates some Christian graces with success. That the world will not accept it, even when clothed with the garb of philosophy and named with the holy name of Christ, is proof that the instinct of freedom in the personality detects the fault in the philosophy of compulsion.

Insisting, then, that no ancestral strain can compel us beyond our choice, we are ready as Christians to admit all which can